"Laws have to determine what's legal, but you can't ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can't ban it."
That's what early investor David Scalzo told the New York Times
"The weaponization possibilities of this are endless," said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. "Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail."
Hoan Ton-That, the creator of this new facial recognition tool, was once a model and, until recently, listed an obscure iPhone app
One of the investors involved in the company's first round of funding, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, was famous for secretly funding the lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan against Gawker , a lawsuit which eventually led to the website's bankruptcy. Gawker had previously published negative articles on both Thiel and Ton-That.
According to the company, they have scraped more than three billion images from Facebook
This database far surpasses any similar efforts by the U.S. government or Silicon Valley giants who tend to shy away from technology that could have such a massive eroding effect on our privacy. Not so the more than 600 law enforcement agencies which have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company. Despite not being sure how the technology works or whether or not their security is ensured, law enforcement officers have used Clearview to solves cases involving everything from shoplifting and identity theft to murder and child exploitation. However, it's not just law enforcement that has access to the app. Clearview has licensed the app for security purposes to "at least a handful" of companies.
After considering using the tool to vet babysitters, to help security guards, to allow hotel employees to great guests by name, or to help a "pro-white" Republican get elected (Ton-That denies this last one), the company finally settled on sharing the tool with law enforcement.
Clearview's co-founder Richard Schwartz who served as an aide to Rudy Giuliani during his time as mayor of New York, has used his extensive network to market the tool to law enforcement. Schwartz has called upon a collection of current and former Republican officials to act as the company's emissaries with law enforcement. The company's main contact for customers is a former Republican campaign manager; their former "growth consultant" is a former N.F.L. agent engaged to Fox Nation host Lomi Lahren. Clearview claims they have also enlisted Democrats to market their product.
Still, the app seems to genuinely be helping law enforcement so far. According to Clearview's sales presentation as reviewed by The Time, "a person who was accused of sexually abusing a child whose face appeared in the mirror of someone's else gym photo; the person behind a string of mailbox thefts in Atlanta; a John Doe found dead on an Alabama sidewalk; and suspects in multiple identity-fraud cases at banks," were all able to be identified using the app.
Of course, that's assuming the software works: "We have no data to suggest this tool is accurate," said Clare Garvie of Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology. Garvie studies the government's use of facial recognition and told the Times "The larger the database, the larger the risk of misidentification because of the doppelgänger effect. They're talking about a massive database of random people they've found on the internet." So far, the app does have a tendency to produce false matches, particularly for people of color.
The efforts made by the company to block the Times' investigations also raise some concerns. Before contacting the company, Time reporter Kashmir Hill asked a handful of law enforcement to run her photo through the database. Clearview soon contacted those officials to ask if they were speaking to the media. For a time after that, Hill's face was "flagged" by Clearview, and searches garnered no results at all. This means a private company has the ability to monitor the activity of law enforcement without oversight and can also manipulate the results officials can see.
During a demonstration by Ton-That himself, the app was still able to identify Hill with her nose and the bottom half of her face covered. You can change the privacy settings on your social media to block search engines from linking to your profiles, but if your photo has already been scraped, it's too late.
Tech experts are using very strong language to characterize their concerns. "Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we're all screwed," said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law. Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University-Boston, said of the technology, "I don't see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it."
